> That sounds... vaguely inefficient to me? All languages and writing have built-in redundancy In Egyptian, you can probably get away with writing the determi

> That sounds... vaguely inefficient to me? All languages and writing have built-in redundancy In Egyptian, you can probably get away with writing the determiner in question + vertical stroke below it, to mean the determined thing. I guess Egyptians would understand you (that's how they wrote some common words like 'sun', with sun disk + | stroke). The vertical stroke is somewhat like putting spaces around the symbol in our writing system. But usually that's not desirable because then you need to be extra-careful with drawing your dog or penis. And most writing wasn't carved in stone, it was a simplified hieratic style where a length of one stroke could be very important So, some redundancy is useful. In Egyptian it usually means adding phonetic symbols before the image (imagine drawing a pen before a penis to show how the word sounds; then, you could have also drawn a duck before penis before the penis image to mean a different word that sounds like duck).